Spare Me the Complements: An Immoderate Proposal for

Eliminating the “We/They” Category Boundary

Stevan Harnad

Chaire de recherche du Canada en sciences cognitives

Université du Québec à Montréal

SELF (+)

WORLD (-)

Selfish genesSelfish organismsSelf-interest vs. indifferenceMaladaptive traitsExtinct descendentsInclusive fitnessKindred genesKin & kindThe we/they boundaryDiscrimination/bias

WE (+)

THEY (-)

ImprintingCritical periodAttachmentKin and kindGeneralization

CATEGORY (+)

COMPLEMENT (-)

Category members (+) Category complement (non-members (-) )Dichotomies, PolychotomiesWithin-category variationBetween-category variationInvarianceInvariant (discriminating) featuresCategory learning with corrective +/-

feedback

To Cognize is to Categorize:Cognition is Categorization

We are sensorimotor systems who learn to sort and manipulate the world according to the kinds of things in it, and based on what sensorimotor features our brains can detect and use to do so.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/catconf.html

Living (and some nonliving) creatures are sensorimotor systems. The objects in the world come in contact with their sensory surfaces. That sensorimotor contact "affords” (Gibson’s term) some kinds of interaction and not others.

1. Sensorimotor Systems

What a sensorimotor system is and is not able to do depends on what features can be extracted from its motor interactions with the “shadows” that objects cast on its sensory surfaces. How do we see the many different-sized and different-shaped shadows of things as being the same size, shape, and thing? Some features remain constant or invariant across sensorimotor variations or transformations. Our brains somehow manage to selectively “pick up” and use those invariant features (“affordances”).

Shape constancy Peter Kaiser http://www.yorku.ca/eye/

2. Invariant Sensorimotor Features (“Affordances”)

Size constancy http://www.mit.edu/~lera/

Categorization is a systematic differential interaction between an autonomous, adaptive sensorimotor system and its world.

3. What is Categorization?

This excludes ordinary physical interactions like the effects of the wind blowing on the sand in the desert.

The categorization The categorization problem is to determine problem is to determine howhow our brains sort the our brains sort the "blooming, buzzing "blooming, buzzing confusion" of our inputsconfusion" of our inputs into the orderly categories we see and act upon.

4. Learning

Categories are kinds. Categorizing is taking place when the same output systematically keeps being produced with the same kind of input (rather than only with the exact same input). Categorization is closely tied to learning.

Jerry Fodor thinks we were born with the capacity to categorize all the kinds of things we categorize without ever having to learn to do so.

(Chomsky has a similar conjecture, but only about Universal Grammar [UG]).

Big-Bang theory of the origin

of categories

5. Innate Categories

Evolved categories

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/andy.calder/perception.shtml

Evidence suggests that most of our categories are learned. Open a dictionary: you find mostly kinds of objects, events, states, features, actions. Were we born already knowing what are and are not in those categories, or did we have to learn it?

6. Learned Categories

Sorting newborn chicks as males or females takes years of trial-and-error training, errors corrected under the supervision of grandmasters.

7. Supervised Learning Tasks: Hard and Easy: Hard

A pigeon can learn to peck at one key whenever it sees a black circle and another key whenever it sees a white circle. If later tested on circles that are intermediate shades of gray, the pigeon will show a smooth "generalization gradient," pecking more on the "black" key for darker grays, more on the “white” key for lighter grays, and randomly for midway-gray.

8. Operant Learning: Usually Easy

Catharine Rankin http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~crankin/Clwork2b.htm

If we used red/yellowyellow instead of black/white, the correct choice of key and the amount of pressing would increase much more abruptly (categorically). This is similar to hot/cold: a neutral midpoint, neither cold nor hot, and an abrupt qualitative (categorical) difference between the "warm" and "cool" range on either side of the neutral midpoint.

9. Color Categories

ba/da/ga phoneme boundaries

“Warping" of similarity space: Differences are compressed within categories and expanded between.

Color CP is innate. It was "learned" through Darwinian evolution.

10. Categorical Perception (CP)

Machine learning algorithms try to explain the "how" of categorization. Unsupervised models cluster things according to their internal similarities and dissimilarities, enhancing the contrasts.

11. Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning will not work if there are different ways of clustering the very same inputs, depending on context. In such cases, error-corrective feedback is needed too, to find the right needle (features) in the haystack.

Think of a table, and all the other things you could have called it, depending on the context of alternatives:“thing,” “object,” “vegetable,” “handiwork,” “furniture,” “hardwood,” “Biedermeier,” even “ ‘Charlie’ ”).

12. Supervised Learning““How’s yir How’s yir wife?”wife?” ““Compayured to wot?”Compayured to wot?”

Some (e.g. Fodor) have suggested that learning is impossible in many cases because there are no sensorimotor invariants (common features) to base it on.Go back to the dictionary: What does the intersection of all the sensory shadows of tables (let alone chicken-bottoms!) have in common?

13. “Vanishing Intersections”

And what are the sensory shadows of categories like "goodness,” "truth," or "beauty"?

Don’t give up! If organisms can and do categorize inputs correctly, then it’s a safe bet that there must exist a sensorimotor basis for their success, picked up either through evolution, learning, or both.

14. Direct Sensorimotor Invariants

Tijsseling & Harnad 1997

But does it all have to be based on direct sensorimotor invariants?

No, “goodness,” “truth” and “beauty” are links in an unbroken chain of abstraction leading from categories acquired through direct sensory experience to those acquired through "hearsay” (i.e. through language).

15. Abstraction and Hearsay

=+

“ ‘ZEBRA’ = HORSE + STRIPES ”

To abstract is to single out some subset of the sensory input, and ignore the rest.

Borges, in his 1944 short story, "Funes the Memorious," describes a person who cannot forget, and hence cannot abstract.

1: Luis Melián Lafinur, 2: Olimar, 3: azufre, 4: los bastos, 5: la ballena, 6: el gas, 7: la caldera, 8: Napoléon, 9: Agustín de Vedía…10: ……

Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.

16. Abstraction and Forgetting

Luria described a real person, "S" who had handicaps that went in the same direction.

Living in the world requires detecting what recurs by forgetting or ignoring what makes every instant unique.

If all sensorimotor features are on a par there can be no abstraction of the invariants that allow us to recognize kinds.

17. Invariance and Recurrence

Watanabe’s "Ugly Duckling Theorem" shows how, considered only logically, the odd swanlet is no less similar to any of the ducklings than the ducklings are to one another.

18. Feature Selection and Weighting

The only reason it appears otherwise to us is that our visual system "weights" certain features more heavily than others.

George Miller pointed out in “The Magical Number 7+/-2” that we can categorize far fewer things than we can discriminate.

19. Discrimination vs. Categorization

≠

Discrimination is relative n = JNDs just-noticeable-differences

= “X”

Categorization is “absolute” (n = 7 +/- 2 “chunks”)“How’s yir wife?”

“Compayured to wot?”

One way to increase our categorization capacity is to add more sensory dimensions of variation.

Another way of increasing memory is by recoding. In recoding, the features are re-weighted. Then objects of the same kind, because they share invariant features, are seen as more similar (CP).

20. Recoding

Whorf’s Hypothesis was that language determines how things look to us.

But colors turned out to be innate, and "eskimo snow terms" turned out to be a canard (based on misunderstanding agglutinative languages).

Yet learned CP is a genuine Whorfian effect: the warping of similarity space, with compression and separation, induced by supervised learning.

21. Learned Categorical Perception (CP)

Pevtzow, R. & Harnad, S. (1997)

The fact that we usually do not know (and hence we cannot say) what are the features that we use to categorize does not mean they do not exist!

Biederman was able to find and teach novices the "geon" features and rules for chicken sexing through explicit instruction. They could then quickly sex chickens at a (green-belt) level that should have taken many long trials of supervised learning.

22. Explicit Learning

= + + +…

All categorization is abstraction. (Only Funes lives in the world of the concrete.) But people usually cannot tell you how they do categorize. What explicit knowledge we do have, however, we can convey to one another much more efficiently through hearsay than through trial-and-error experience. This is what gave language the powerful adaptive advantage that it had for our species.

23. Hearsay: A New Way To Acquire Categories

Cangelosi & Harnad 2002

I could acquire most categories through hearsay but it can’t be hearsay all the way down. I still have to learn some things the the hard way, through direct sensorimotor grounding. If the words used in the explicit instruction are to mean anything to me, they have to name categories I already have.

24. Sensorimotor Grounding

“ ‘ZEBRA’ = HORSE + STRIPES ”

UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORY (+)

(1) WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE:

(1a) A BACHELOR

(1b) AWAKE (ALIVE, CONSCIOUS/FEELING)

(2) WHAT EXISTS

(3) WHAT A “LAYLEK” IS

(+)

“WE” (+)

“Aggregates-in-Flux”Male and female care-givers and age-matesAll children keep transferring from aggregate

to aggregate during critical periodAll aggregates are equivalent: only the

individuals varyOnly invariant is that they are humanAttachment can only be to the invariantNo imprinting on individualsEveryone is “We”: No “They”The only kin and kind is humanity

Aggregates is obviously not practicable because of our initial selfish interests

Why not?Is an approximation possible?Might other categories benefit from being

kept uncomplemented too?

All of our categories are just ways we behave differently toward different kinds of things, whether things we do or don’t eat, mate with, or flee from, or things we describe, through our language, as prime numbers, affordances, or truth.

And isn’t that what cognition is all about -- and for?

25. Cognition is Categorization

Harnad, S. (1987, unpublished) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology.http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/21/34

Harnad, S. (2003) Categorical Perception. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan.http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/catperc.html

Harnad, S. (2003) Symbol-Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan.http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/symgro.htm

References